Music will generally sound better coming through the Sonos speaker system in your home than your phone or computer, so it's a no brainer that Spotify subscribers want to stream albums this way. Fortunately new features have found their way into the beta version of the Android app that make this a better experience.

A number of these additions help you find new content. Spotify Premium subscribers can now start radio stations from any artist or track and get recommendations based on the time of day. The app will also do its part to help you discover newly released albums, and access to charts lets you see what music is trending in various parts of the world.

Kodi, formerly XBMC, has been available on Android in its revamped form since early April. But if you wanted to get your hands on it, you had to join either the alpha or beta groups on Google+, then register on the Play Store as a tester. Not so today: it looks like the developers have opened up the beta Play Store listing for one and all, and you can download it directly to your phone, tablet, or Android TV set-top box.

Do you hate advertising, and by extension, the vast majority of free content on the planet? Do you spend hours defending your decision to block ads on the Internet, television, video games, apps, and in real life via an intricate system of automatic blinders? Then the ever-growing crop of Android web browsers has a new entry just for you. This one comes from AdBlock Plus, probably the most recognizable name in browser-based advertisement blocking.

If you've got a Find 7 or Find 7a phone from OPPO and you're itching for an official Lollipop ROM, head on over to the company's user forums. A beta version of Color OS 2.1, running on top of Android 5.0 code, has been posted for you to download. At the moment this edition of the software is not available via an over-the-air update, though that should be coming soon enough.

Microsoft has released the first Android beta of Hyperlapse Mobile, the culmination of a couple of years research. The app captures video from your camera and outputs a smooth, sped-up time lapse, which is far more complicated than you might expect. It can also convert existing videos. Rather than simply give you an end product that is akin to watching your video on fast forward, Hyperlapse intelligently chooses frames that make it far easier to watch.

Meerkat integrates with your Twitter account to let you stream live video to the world (or at least anyone who clicks on your feed). If you've been waiting to play around with the service, or this idea just sounds invigorating to you, Meerkat is now exiting its invite-only beta and opening itself up to everyone on Google Play.

I hopped into the app long enough to watch a truck driver talk about his route and what he's hauling, see some guy chat really quickly in front of a computer, and start my own brief stream of a Chromebook sitting atop a desk.

As our internal collaboration platform, Hipchat is special to the AP team. It's a great service for keeping track of assignments, chatting with team members, and sharing info, but until now the mobile app has been just a little behind the curve on design.

Today it looks like that's changing, as Hipchat beta received an update with material design.

The new Hipchat beta has native rendering for messages and will now honor your system's font size settings, but of course the overarching design is the real story here.

SwiftKey has announced beta version 5.3 of its third-party keyboard, and this time the highlight feature concerns a new menu for accessing content and settings. It's called the SwiftKey Hub.

This little menu appears to the left of the prediction bar. It serves as a quick way to access the app's most popular settings. This is a change from having to activate a separate key's secondary function, as SwiftKey (using the 123 key) and many other alternative keyboards have done.